2004 Mini Cooper S; Manual; Sharp!! on 2040-cars

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Watch this Chinese stunt driver parallel park with only 3 inches to spare

Whenever this writer thinks of fancy parking jobs, we go straight to Buddy Love singing Strokin' in a red Dodge Viper he slides into a tiny space in The Nutty Professor. But after watching the video above, we might have to start thinking about Han Yue, who broke the world record for getting into the tightest parallel parking space. The previous record was set in July 2013 by Alastair Moffatt, who had 3.4 inches to spare between his car and those around. Yue used a Mini Cooper at the China Drift Championship in Chongqing, China, to shrink that gap to 3.15 inches. That gave Yue two world records at the same event: the day before, he used a BMW M4 to set the world record for doing the most donuts around a car driving on two wheels. Which, frankly, we didn't even know was a competitive thing... Related Gallery 2014 Mini Cooper: First Drive View 47 Photos News Source: Guinness World Records via YouTubeImage Credit: Copyright 2014 Jeremy Korzeniewski / AOL MINI Hatchback Guinness World Records parallel parking

Automotive April Fools' joke roundup [w/videos]

Happy April, everyone. And we all know what this first day of the month means: April Fools' Day. Today is a national holiday for pranksters with the Internet acting as a serious enabler, and it's always fun to see what kind of vivid imaginations exist out there in the automotive world. The abundance of fake news gets a little old as the day rolls on, but we did manage to get in a few chuckles thanks to a handful of major automakers and automotive news outlets that got into the pranking spirit this year
Some of our favorites this year includes Subaru showing what happens when you combine a bunch of rumors, a Corvette some may have already thought was a joke or Honda providing some in-car innovation circa the late 1980s. Honestly, we're still waiting for official confirmation from Mitsubishi that the recently introduced 2014 Mirage is an elaborate April Fools' joke using a failed design intended for the 1995 Geo Metro. We dug up as much "official" OEM foolishness we could find, as well as some of our other favorites, and posted them all below.

Mini Cooper Countryman only small car to earn good grade in latest IIHS crash tests [w/video]

Competitors in the small-car segment didn't do nearly as well. Four vehicles earned "poor" grades.
Only one small car out of 12 tested earned a good grade in the latest round of crash-test results compiled by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The Mini Cooper Countryman received a "good" ranking on the organization's small-front overlap test.